[Talk-ca] Amateur Radio Maps...

Stewart C. Russell scruss at gmail.com
Mon Dec 12 19:20:11 GMT 2011


If anyone's confused about what these maps would look like, I have some examples here: http://glaikit.org/2011/12/11/not-really-getting-the-azimuthal-equidistant-projection-right/

They were made with the not-exactly free AZ_PROJ, a utility written entirely in PostScript. 

For a great (but non-free) example of a grey line (day/night) map, see http://pskreporter.info

Cheers
 Stewart

On 2011-12-12, at 9:23, Colin McGregor <colin.mc151 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Last Saturday I was at a party co-hosted by Richard Weait (thanks),
> where the topic of maps for amateur radio use came up.
> 
> A topic that has been of interest to me is amateur radio and disaster response.
> 
> So, I am looking for software that will generate two maps from Open
> Street Map data:
> 
> - An azimuthal equidistant projection map for any arbitrary latitude / longitude
> - A day and night map (ie: what parts of the world are CURRENTLY in
> sunshine / darkness)
> 
> So, what makes the requirement for the above a little tough?  I want
> the software to be under the GPL (or some other open license) so it
> can be redistributed without issue. I want it for Linux (so the OS to
> support the application can also be redistributed without issue). I
> want the application to run stand-alone (so if there is a problem with
> the internet connection I don't want the application to suddenly
> become useless). The data for this can not be more than a few MB at
> most (but then this shouldn't be an issue, given that road, rail, land
> use data is irrelevant for these apps, all that is needed is
> continental outlines, MAJOR lakes, rivers, islands and cities).
> 
> So, why the interest in these maps?
> 
> Many amateur radio antenna are directional (doing a better job of
> receiving (or transmitting) a signal in one particular direction).
> With an azimuthal equidistant projection map done for your location,
> you can draw a line from the center of the map to the location you are
> interested in and that will instantly tell you the direction to adjust
> your directional antenna. This is static map, as in you generate the
> map once for a given latitude / longitude you are effectively done.
> 
> High frequency radio signals can refract off the ionosphere allowing
> very long range communications with low power transmitters. What
> frequencies refract well depends on a number factors, including
> sunshine / darkness. So knowing that the place you want to talk to is
> in darkness is useful. So, a day night map would have to be dynamic,
> being updated say once per minute ...
> 
> Anyone with ideas as to where I could / should turn for the above?
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Colin McGregor
> VE3ZAA
> 
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